Friday, May 11, 2012, 10:25 am

Child Labor and Agribusiness Churn Washington’s Food Fight

Email this article to a friend

your email

your name

recipient(s) email (comma separated)

message

captcha

A young worker holds an orange in a migrant worker camp in Florida. (Photo courtesy of Human Rights Watch)

For a moment in Washington, it seemed like the White House was finally getting serious about reforming the agricultural labor system, with a common sense rule about preventing harm to child workers. But under pressure from the agribusiness lobby, the administration appears to have retreated from an initiative to tighten protection for childrens’ safety and health in agricultural jobs.

Then advocates were distressed when the proposed reforms were held up under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the administration’s gatekeeper for regulatory proposals. The final affront came in April when the Labor Department announced that it was pulling the proposal in response to opposition from producers.

While the new rules would have explicitly exempted family farms, critics painted the measure as an assault on the rural way of life, glossing over the need to shield kids, many from migrant families, from the day-to-day brutality of industrial farm labor. The administration not only recycled these whitewashed arguments, but even scrubbed its own website of information explaining the proposal, according to the Pump Handle.

Actually, the migrant children in the fields today, facing severe poverty and limited educational opportunities, starkly represent how far modern industrial farming has drifted from the bygone bucolic ideal of the family farm.

The Obama administration’s cave on the child labor regulations show how deeply agribusiness has penetrated the Beltway; the opposition to the rule change was led by the corporate-dominated American Farm Bureau Federation, which praised the administration for reacting to “grassroots action.”

Yet in the legislative proposal outlined by the Senate Agricultural Committee in late April (just as the Labor Department withdrawing from child labor reforms), contains vague language on promoting American jobs, and yet virtually nothing on the core issues affecting farmworkers. Though a massive population of immigrants is threatened every day by abusive and unhealthy working conditions, the farm bill is premised on a labor system that keeps American appetites sated, profit margins fattened, and workers impoverished. Meanwhile, the roots of the current immigration crisis can be traced back to the federal farm subsidy system that has distorted global markets and displaced countless farmers in Mexico.

Advocates for sustainable agriculture have pushed for reforms that would make the food system more just, including curtailing the hyper-consolidation of the agricultural production chain. But it’s unlikely that immigration issues, or even labor issues related to migrants, will be comprehensively addressed this year.

Low wages in the agricultural sector certainly contribute to the need for children to work alongside their parents. Most agricultural laborers in non-family farm establishments are poor and in many cases, undocumented migrant workers. The jobs are precarious for the most part. This contributes to an atmosphere where workers are afraid to bring up any abuses, whether wage or health-related, to authorities for fear of retaliation by their employers. ... If children’s health is seen as expendable in the eyes of the Obama administration, hazards facing adult workers will never see the light of day.

Child farmworker struggles are symptoms of a blight that’s buried by the spin of corporate agriculture: the politics of the food system are spoiled rotten.

Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the "Belabored" podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.